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Triskel travel terminated…

We tried very hard to get to Cork for the Alternative History concert in Triskel’s 40th birthday series but the weather gods eventually won. Jacob Heringman got as far as Holyhead before turning back after my flight was cancelled. After all Tony Sheehan’s hard work to get us there I just wanted to cry, but we’ll have another go later in the year. If you’re sitting in Cork airport with a cancelled flight, the album is on Spotify… or you can catch us soon in Poland, Spain, the UK or the Canary Islands.

Islas Canarias

So I now have a few days off before going to the Canary Islands with Ariel Abramovich for the Sacred Music Festival. Our programme there is a new one and is the first in our 10th anniversary season. The title In This Trembling Shadow comes from the eponymous song in Dowland’s Pilgrim’s Solace. We’ll also be doing the famous Thou Mighty God trilogy from the same book, Campion’s Author of Light and motets by Victoria. In between there will be movements from Byrd’s 3 voice mass.

The first recital is at the Iglesia de Santa Brigida in Gran Canaria on March 16th. We then go to Tenerife and the Iglesia de Las Clarisas in La Laguna on March 17th, and finally to the Iglesia San Francisco in Sta.Cruz de La Palma. Three evenings of intensive music making in amazing churches (and much as love snow it’ll be relief do go somewhere where there isn’t any).

Tristram Shandy

I come back to England for the Tristram Shandy celebration on March 22nd before re-joining Ariel in Madrid the next day on our way to Ecuador. For the concert at St George’s Hanover Square I’ll be getting together briefly with my old Hilliard Ensemble colleagues for a performance of Roger Marsh’s Poor Yorick. This promises to be a hugely entertaining evening with readings and music on the 250th anniversary of Sterne’s funeral in the same building.

Festival Internacional de Música Sacra Quito

This will be my first visit to Ecuador, and we’ll be starting with a workshop on the 24th, then concerts on the 25th and 26th. The programme will be In This Trembling Shadow, and once again in extraordinarily beautiful churches. The Festival website isn’t up and running yet, so more details to follow.

Flammarion Correspondences

At the beginning of April I’ll be spending a week at Trinity Laban working on Edward Jessen’s Flammarion Correspondences. This is a preliminary exploration with a production company intended to produce promotional material which will appeal to theatrical promoters in the UK and Europe. We’re aiming at a work-in-progress preview on Friday April 13th.

Life after Josquin

Jacob Heringman and I had the first outing of our Josquin programme at Newcastle University last week. We were asked not to cross the picket line and to cancel the concert, but I came to an amicable understanding with the union having gently I pointed out that they were expecting us to give up our meagre fee so that they could have a better pension and I couldn’t recall any of my old academic colleagues volunteering a pay cut so freelance musicians could be paid more. I was all prepared to thank a tiny audience for crossing the line and announce that we nevertheless supported the strike, but was completely wrong-footed when we went on stage to one of the biggest audiences for a lute song recital that I’ve seen for a while.

Our next performance, probably of this programme or something very like it, will be one of the smallest at a house concert in York. We’ll be doing two performances (with tea and biscuits!): 2.30 for 3.00 or around 4.30 for 5.00 on April 22nd. Unlike our previous one in the hugely resonant King’s Hall this will be very intimate, and perhaps not unlike listeners in the early 17th century might have experienced it (I don’t think I’ve ever performed in such a minimal acoustic, and I hope it doesn’t sound like my front room). You can book a seat here but be quick as it’s likely to be full.

In May we’ll be back to a more resonant acoustic in the 12th century church of All Saints Sutton Courtenay. We’ll be doing parts of all three Byrd masses as well as Jake’s transcriptions of Warlock, Moeran, Peter Pope and Stephen Wilkinson at the English Music Festival.

Since the last update more details have come in about Roger Marsh’s Poor Yorick at the Laurence Sterne celebrations with my former Hilliard Ensemble colleagues on March 22, after which I leave for Ecuador for concerts and a masterclass in Quito with Ariel Abramovich. I’ll post further details about all these shortly, and concerts in April with Edward Jessen and Jacob Heringman.

Tony Banks’ new orchestral album 5 has had a rapturous reception in the prog press, and Tony has spoken about the songs he’s composed for me on the Genesis-News Website as well as in the current Record Collector (no relation to The Record Collector I mentioned in a recent post):

I went several times to the Marquee in 1967 though I didn’t see the Nice. I did hear the Yardbirds (with Eric Clapton), John Mayall, Sonny Boy Williamson, Long John Baldry and a very young and delicate Rod (‘the Mod’, as he then was) Stewart. The Swingles stayed at the same hotel as Rod in Perth about ten years later, and we all stood and gawped as he processed through the foyer with his entourage. I once heard a journalist ask Ward Swingle what he thought of progressive bands like Genesis, Pink Floyd, Nice, Yes? To which he replied ‘Very…’.

The diary for the next couple of months looks like this at the moment (recent updates in blue):

Life after Josquin

Jacob Heringman and I start the season with our new Life after Josquin programme at the King’s Hall Newcastle at lunchtime on February 22nd. This continues the Alternative History agenda of performing 15th & 16th century polyphony as it might have been performed by subsequent generations deconstructed for voice and lute. We’ll be doing Josquin’s Pange Lingua mass and motets by Tallis and Byrd. At the English Music Festval later in the year we’ll be doing a programme of Byrd and Tallis alongside Jake’s intabulations of Warlock, Moeran and Peter Pope, and keep an eye out for our version of Dufay’s L’homme arme mass with my old Hilliard colleague David James.

Triskel’s 40th anniversary season

The full Alternative History quartet will assemble in Cork the following week for our contribution to the Triskel Arts Centre’s 40th season. The programme, Secret History: Renaissance Polyphony for Voices & Vihuelas, is based on the album (Victoria’s Missa Surge Propera and motets by Josquin) and will be recorded by Lyric FM and broadcast throughout the EBU on European Early Music Day on March 21st. This is doubly wonderful for us – firstly it’s a delight and a privilege to be back at Triskel, and secondly as a European ensemble it’s fantastic to be broadcasting to the whole continent from a proper European country. A huge thankyou to Tony Sheehan and to Lyric FM. Later in the year the quartet be returning to Poland and Spain, and even to the UK…

Festival de Música Religiosa de Canarias

Ariel Abramovich will start our tenth anniversary season with a short tour of the Canary Islands March 14-18. This will also tap into the Alternative History idea, this time with a programme based on the Paston manuscripts featuring English and European music from many periods as it might have been performed in England in the early 17th century.

Stay tuned for news of Former Members of the Hilliard Ensemble late March in London, and have a look at Lalala for an interview with yours truly which expands a bit on my time with the Hilliards and other collaborations.

This is a riot of a book. If you’re interested in tenors it’s a must, if you’re interested in Franco Corelli you’ve probably already got it. If tenors’ sex lives are your thing, then you’ll learn a lot more than you probably want to know about tenorial orgasms, il pompino bolognese (Google it) and the like. Oh, and there’s quite a lot of tenor history thrown in. Don’t expect analysis or conventional referencing – this is not an objective academic tome. Stefan Zucker, self-styled opera fanatic, former baby-sitter to Franco Corelli, only begetter of the Bel Canto Society, radio personality extraordinaire, sometime holder of the Guiness Book of Records highest known tenor note, is not a conventional biographer.

I’ve been a fan of Stefan Zucker for many years. His Bel Canto Society has produced countless recordings and articles on both the greatest and most obscure opera singers – and with the minimum outside financial help. I was very happy to acknowledge his work in my Tenor: History of Voice, though what most appeals is his complete obsession with opera singers and his no holds barred opinions on everything from larynx position and falsetto to sex and squillo.

It’s a maddening book – stuffed full of anecdote and facts that you won’t find anywhere else, but devilishly difficult to find your way around. The first volume is more coherent (and less salacious) and there’s a third one to come which will focus on singers who aren’t Corelli. Stefan and I have exchanged books in the past but we haven’t corresponded for a while, so I was astonished to discover that one of his chapters is devoted to my tenor book – which he basically seems to have enjoyed apart from the falsetto question. He calls what pre-chested top C tenors do at the top head voice, whereas my interpretation of the sources suggests falsetto (though I have to confess that as a tenor myself I don’t have a real falsetto and if I could sing a top C it would be in head voice). It’s possible we’re both guilty of over-insistence on our beliefs, and tenors are never if not opinionated. He points out a few inaccuracies and mis-attributions in my effort (but tactfully ignores the main howler which I corrected in the paperback reprint, which referred to the top Cs in Traviata rather than Tell (I must have been asleep at the wheel there).

I can’t wait to see what Stefan has to say about Corelli’s contemporaries and successors in Volume 3. Unsurprisingly, he has a tendency to compare them unfavourably with his hero and he doesn’t pull any punches if the extract on Jonas Kaufmann published in a recent Newsletter is anything to go by. I’m wondering what he’ll have to say about Rolando Villazon, whom I had the chance to interview for a TV programme a few years ago. When I arrived at the Covent Garden rehearsal room Villazon was sitting on the floor doing a piece to camera on Corelli. At the end of the first take I couldn’t resist saying that he hadn’t mentioned Corelli’s legs, which were reckoned by some to be the best pair ever seen on a tenor (a bit of a risk as we hadn’t yet been introduced). He began again: …and Franco Corelli, he had it all, including two of the best pairs of legs in the business…then immediately realising what he’d said, he added…though he only used one pair at a time, of course. I can’t remember if that made the final cut, but it set the scene for a totally memorable encounter. It was enormous fun, with Rolando fizzing away the whole time. So much energy! I’d taken the precaution of bringing along my copy of his Massenet & Gounod album and he agreed to sign it as long as I signed his copy of my book (that was a surprise). Of course, he never just signs, so I’m now the proud possessor of a Villazon cartoon of the two of us talking tenor stuff.

Some academic writing is objective to the point where you wonder if the author actually likes the topic. There’s a lot to be said for the informed fanaticism of the dedicated enthusiast. Combine this with an obsessive collecting mentality and you have another of my favourite institutions: The Record Collector. I have to own up to a certain nerdy tendency to ‘collect’ old recordings, but it’s only the singing I’m interested in and a list of serial numbers of old 78s will make my eyes glaze over. But it is exactly this attention to minute detail that drives many of the contributors to The Record Collector (don’t forget the definite article, as I did on the first printing of my tenor book – the article-less publication is a different kettle of vocal fry all together). You won’t find hundreds of footnotes, but you will find detailed, meticulous writing by collectors who love what they are writing about. The bizarre magic of the serial numbers and so on is there, but (sometimes almost incidentally) there are also wonderful insights into the singing of the early twentieth century. There’s a terrific bias towards tenors which suited me just fine, and there’s an annual CD of long forgotten singing which never fails to get the juices going. I don’t write write about tenors these days, but I may return to the fray in the future, and if I do I don’t doubt that the Bel Canto Society and the Record Collector will be essential reading.

Both of these extraordinary resources operate on a shoestring in a world dominate by big conglomerates, so if you’re interested in the history of singing (early music students take note!) sign up for a subscription.

Every now and again something happens to remind me that the life of a freelance performer is not quite the same as those who do a regular job. You share with your fellow musicians the excitements and the uncertainties of life on the road or in the studio and you have to get to know people pretty quickly, often working in intense bursts with people who briefly become great friends but whom you may never see again.

A few months ago I was contacted by Gillian Williams, wife of the trombonist Roger Williams who died earlier this year after a long struggle with cancer. Gillian had some photos that she thought might be of me, that Roger had taken back in the eighties. Would I like them? The first rule of being a performer is never listen to your recordings and the second is never look at your photographs, so it was with some trepidation that I asked Gillian to send them. I’ve lost count of the number of photographers I’ve met over the years, but some stand out. My earliest pro photographer memories are of sitting on a canon in the Tower of London with the Gentle Power of Song while someone from Polydor tried to get us to take the session seriously. Some years later Colin Gibbs took the iconic shot of the Swingles in a mason’s yard that became the cover of Madrigals (but what impressed me most was being driven around in CBS art director Roslav Szaybo’s brand new E-type Jag). The Douglas Brothers pics for the cover of Red Byrd’s Songs of love and Death were also spectacular (Factory Records sparing no expense). The Hilliards used to dread photo sessions, but every so often Roberto Masotti would hit the mark between espressi at his Milan place (the Officium cover is one of his) and Tonmeister Peter Laenger was, like Roger Williams, a musician who also had a very sensitive eye for a visual composition. The other cover pic that stands out is Anna Tchernakova’s shot of Anna Maria Friman and me for Gavin Bryars’ Oi me lasso – Anna looking serene as ever and me close to death with ‘flu. More recently I’ve had some windy, wet and wonderful times with Guy Carpenter and the Alternative History project (there was a wonderfully orange reproduction of his water shot in the programme booklet for the Poznan Nostalgia Festival last week).

Seeing Roger Williams’ photos brought back a sheaf of memories from so long ago it seems like another life. As a musician Roger knew what it was like to be photographed, to have to summon up enthusiasm for something so vital and yet so tangential to what we do. We were all struggling young(ish) musicians then and it probably cost him more in film than I was able to pay him. The results still look convincing after thirty years. I probably first met him around 1983 as there’s a set of shots from the one gig I did with Gothic Voices, Christopher Page, Rogers Covey-Crump, Margaret Philpot looking very young.

Sometime after that there’s a set of formal portraits to send to promoters and agents (in which I look uncannily like my son Ned who’s now several years older than I was then) , and from 1988 a series of publicity shots for Henry Brown’s ‘And the Word was made Flesh’. This was an elaborate theatre piece that subsequently got me into no end of trouble. The pictures are from a dress rehearsal and Henry hadn’t finished constructing the set so Roger had to capture the spirit of the work with none of us quite knowing what the show would actually look like.

The plot was based on the pataphysical concepts of Albert Jarry, and took place in and around a giant vagina…

…and involved a complicated sound and light set-up as well as monkey masks and rather fine waistcoats.

One of the props was a ‘Physick stick’ – part pistol and part loo-plunger. The score specified one shot, standing on one leg behind the audience before I clambered onto the stage while everyone was still in shock. The business end of the physick stick – a German bird-scaring pistol – hadn’t arrived in time for the photo session so we had to improvise:

After the first performance I was advised that theatres would require me to have a gun license so I took the contraption to the Essex Police fire arms department, who clearly thought I was bonkers (it’s not me guv, it’s the composer!) but conceded that I’d better have the right paper work. By the time it came through I’d done what turned out to be the last performance and I forgot all about it until a knock on the door a few years later. ‘About your gun, sir…’. ‘What gun?’ ‘The one with the expired licence…’ I retrieved it from the attic. The somewhat bemused WPC obviously hadn’t seen a physick stick before but after some rather surreal discussion she granted me an amnesty on the condition I gave her a carrier bag to take it back to the nick without anyone seeing it. I later kept the props (including a large plastic penis and two infra-red sensitive monkey costumes) in my office at York, and left them there for my successor to enjoy.

‘And the Word’ was the most elaborate and most fun theatre I piece I ever commissioned. It was also the most exhausting, needing hours to set up and take down (it had 8 channel tape wielded by the legendary John Whiting), and I just couldn’t keep it up. The photo session was also the last time I remember seeing Roger. He went on to become one of the most successful bass trombonists, and I got very busy with the Hilliard Ensemble and the newly-founded Red Byrd. I remember him as a warm and charismatic fellow musician with a huge amount of patience. There’s a wonderful online tribute to him by the trumpeter Paul Archibald. I think I only worked once with Paul, and that was on the first performance of part of Stockhausen’s Donnerstag at Riverside Studios under Richard Bernas. It was my first experience of Stockhausen and led indirectly to my being one of the few performers paid a huge sum not to appear at Covent Garden when I understudied the role at very short notice a few years later. My audition piece to Stockhausen and Michael Bogdanov was the monkey dance from ‘And the word was made flesh’.

I haven’t sung Gavin Bryars’ great Shakespeare cycle since the Australia trip a couple of years ago (though we did Sonnet 128 with Alternative History in Querenca last week). This time I’ll be joined by Sarah Dacey (famous soprano from Juice – who many moons ago was the first student to brave doing an MA with me at York). The Leeds performance is at the Howard Assembly Rooms at 7.45 on Wednesday 25th, and then we go to Prague for a performance on the 27th at the Archa Theatre.

Alternative History

We had a great time in Portugal last week and I’m looking forward to our next gig in Poznan at the Nostalgia Festival on November 18th. Jake, Ariel and I will then record some Josquin back in the UK the following week. Our dedicated page on this site is now up and running and you can find more details of the project here.

Cecilia Frode’s Från det blå skåpet

I’m back in Sweden for the last week November for the intriguing Cecilia Frode project with Serikon and Mare Balticum. I now know something of what Cecilia’s script is about and it’s fascinating to watch the audience’s reactions to Från det blå skåpet. And yes, I do wear tails but so do the women, and I get to wear blue shoes. Duo Lingo tells me I’m only 13% fluent in Swedish. Better than the 1% I got down to earlier this year though.

I’m taking most of December off. This is what the current diary looks like:

Some months ago I had a bizarre phone call. Are you the UK’s world expert on John Dowland? Er…well…I spluttered, modesty and all that… It was someone from the production company making the Philip K Dick series currently showing on Channel 4. I had to sign a confidentiality agreement before I found out anything more, and then I was sent a script for Crazy Diamond, which went out last night. My task was to teach one actor (Steve Buscemi) to teach another actor (Sidse Babbet Knudsen) a bit of Flow my Tears, to enable them to operate some sort of electronic key and burgle a building. A few weeks later I turned up at the rehearsal studio but the two stars needed very little coaching from me. I always try to get singers to sing like actors and here were actors actually doing it (there are plenty of YouTube clips of both of them in action). They were so good I told them they didn’t need me at the actual filming, which was a bit silly, on reflection. Oh, and they said they were going to use the track from my Dowland album over the credits. They didn’t. Steve and Sidse were lovely by the way – and he’s still got my tuning fork.

The Dowland Project will be doing gigs in Germany next autumn.

Alternative History

Amores Pasados was taken by British Airways for their transatlantic flights, and Secret History is continuing the tradition: it’s been selected by Oman Airways. This weekend we’re in Portugal at the XIX Encontro de Música Antiga de Loulé Francisco Rosado. It’ll be the first time we’ve appeared under our new name. It’s a special Shakespeare-orientated programme but we’ll also be doing a couple of Josquin pieces. Next month we’re in Poznan and there are lots of gigs next year, so far in Spain, Poland and Ireland, and even (possibly) in the UK.

Alive or Dead: my life in composers

I’ve been asked to do a composers’ seminar at the Music Department. It’s the first time I’ve been back apart from concerts or seeing old friends. I thought I’d talk about composers I’d worked with since I left. But then I thought why only seven years – I’ll do all sixty since I was a choirboy. That’ll teach them. It’s at 4.00 on Tuesday in Sally Baldwin D008, Music Department, University of York. Open to all – it would be great to see some old friends there.

I’ve now done several PhD defences on the mainland (especially Sweden & Finland). It’s a much bigger deal than the rather perfunctory PhD viva here. You have a public conversation with the candidate (who may have published their dissertation by then, and whose supervisors and internals will have assured themselves that there’s very little likelihood of anything but success). The audience is invited to join in too and there’ll typically be a celebratory lunch for the assembled company. It’s a heart-warming way to recognise the achievement of the student.

I’m usually called in to oppose (that’s what it’s called) artistic research doctorands. Singers-who-can-write-and–know-a-bit-about-academia is still a rather select body and the field of performance research is growing rapidly. I love the disputation part – knowing that you’re going to meet a candidate who’s been properly prepared (often with multiple supervisors and presenting multi-media projects). It’s invariably a dialogue between two artistic grown-ups.

But…I can’t help feeling that whatever follows Post-Modernism is going to have much less use for critical theory. Part of me can’t get enough of Judith Butler or Julia Kristeva, but it’s now a very small part. In the effort to legitimise performance practice research as being of academic value we all encouraged students to ground their work in cultural theory. My own thesis was heavily Gramscian and I do still value the Gramscian bits – though in my defence it was a theoretical thesis not artistic research (which hadn’t yet been invented).

I sometimes came in for a bit of stick from my university colleagues when I began to suggest to students that critical theory was a great intellectual exercise but didn’t have much to do with what I thought of as real life. Having now been out of academia and back into fulltime performing for several years I find myself quite a long way from anything I learned or taught as an academic. This isn’t to say there’s no room for artistic research – it’s more a plea for the research project to be valued on its own terms without the need to relate it to a literature which has surely had all the juice wrung out of it by now. After all, as a Swedish academic pointed out to me recently, if you’re doing a PhD in History or Biology you don’t have to include a chapter on Barthes or Merleau-Ponty (who probably knew as much about both those disciplines as they did about music). Furthermore, very few performers work on their own – we all collaborate with fellow musicians, dancers, actors or whatever, just as scientists and sociologists get together, so let’s have much more joint work.

A post-Post-Modernism artistic research programme will surely have enough practice-based models to call on not to need the abstract theorising which has become formulaic in so many recent theses. A spade is a spade, not a critical tool with which you can enter into dialogue with the earth.

Alternative History has a number of things in common with the Dowland Project, the most obvious of which is that we didn’t settle on a name until after the first release (2nd, in the case of AH). The name business is a really tedious question to wrestle with (we just want to get on with the music) but it’s obviously important for concert promoters and agents. My own only slightly egotistical take on this is that we’re all already known to most of our likely audience, and a new name would mean starting from scratch. We managed to release Amores Pasados under our own individual names, but this led to endless confusion about the name of the album vs the name of the ensemble, a problem which got even worse when Secret History came along. I very much wanted this to have everyone’s name on the front – like everything we do it’s a totally collaborative effort. But having tried several drafts, ECM just couldn’t fit us all on. The result, ironically, is just my name in massive letters. I love the ECM design criteria and I absolutely understand the aesthetic, but it doesn’t always work in favour of the musicians and can have unintended consequences. The Guardian online review has our great Guy Carpenter puddle pic (above) but talks of Potter going solo, which is to completely misunderstand the nature of our work (mind you, one of the German papers talks of ‘the Potter phenomenon’, which no one’s ever called me before). Anyway, the important thing is that the album is out there, and we’ll be featuring a Josquin & Victoria programme alongside Amores Pasados. In the duo programmes with Jake and Ariel we’ll also be doing some Josquin alongside Banks and Sting, and Jake and Ariel will be including duets from the album in their duo programmes. We also have a brilliant Alternative History pdf which we’ll be sending to promoters. I’ll put up an update with press comments etc later this month, and when I have a bit of time (unlikely this month) I’ll do a dedicated Alternative History page. There’s a bit of video and an extract from the Victoria Benedictus on the ECM Facebook site here.

There hasn’t yet been a Gramophone review of Secret History but the September issue has a retrospective of all the Les Noces CDs, of which the 1990 Hyperion recording I did with James Wood comes out top of the pile. We’re in some very distinguished company, so it’s quite an achievement. It was a wonderful Anglo-Russian collaboration, myself and Jane Ginsborg with the formidable Elena Medvedovskaya and Alexander Nazarov (who were very tactful about our pronunciation). I think it’s the only time I’ve recorded in Russian (the Hilliards didn’t record the early Part pieces, though Alternative History has plans…).

This is the diary for September:

8 Conductus Romaldkirk

15 Serikon Uppsala (Luther conference)

18 Benslow Book of Lost Lute Songs (with Jacob Heringman)

18-21 Benslow voice & lute course with Jacob Heringman

27 Serikon/Cecilia Frode Kristianstad

28 Serikon/Cecilia Frode Halmstad

29 Serikon/Cecilia Frode Ystad

30 Serikon/Cecilia Frode Malmo

To come: Alternative History in Portugal and Poland, Gavin Bryars Nothing Like the Sun in Prague and more Serikon/Cecilia Frode shows in southern Sweden

If you’ve been listening to Radio 3’s Composer of the Week – The Birth of Polyphony – you may be interested to know who was doing the singing (Donald Macleod being rather reluctant to identify who’s who). In the second programme I sang for the best part of an hour without once being credited. The opening piece, Leonin’s Goria Redemptori meo (around six minutes) was me and Rogers Covey-Crump, in case you were wondering, and it’s from a live concert recording at one of our Hilliard Cambridge Summer Schools. The programme featured Perotin’s two big four voice pieces Viderunt and Sederunt at the other end of the programme, and in between a huge hunk of Leonin sung by Richard Wistreich and me (from what we think of as our Hyperion Lenin phase). The third programme began with the anonymous Fas et Nefas conductus, sang anonymously by yours truly with Rogers Covey-Crump and Christopher O’Gorman (also available on Hyperion). Well, I guess it’s good for us egomaniacs.

I’ll be listening in to the interval chat during Sunday’s prom. At least we all get a credit in the blurb:

8.10pm INTERVAL: Throwing a Wobbly Louise Fryer uncovers the ups and downs of vocal vibrato. How and why do singers use it? With guests sopranos Janis Kelly and Peyee Chen, tenor John Potter, scientist Helena Daffern and early music researcher Richard Bethell.

While I’m on the subject of the BBC…the Dowland Project gets an honorary mention in Andrea Valentino’s piece for BBC Global News. Along with Sting of course, and Ed Sheeran (the Dowland de nos jours). Thanks to Jake Heringman for sending the link.

FEMAP

A huge thankyou to Josep Maria Dutrèn and the FEMAP team. Ariel and I had a fabulous time in Catalunya – and special thanks to those who followed us all the way up the mountain.